Britney Spears Was Never in Control

Britney Spears Was Never in Control

Britney Spears Was Never in Control Why did I ever believe a teen girl could hold all the power?

The New York Times’s Framing Britney Spears documentary casts a spell. I am thinking specifically of the stretch that chronicles Spears’s rise as a teen idol, starting with the “Baby One More Time” video. I had not seen it since elementary school and was unsettled, as an adult, to watch a 16-year-old embody a schoolgirl fantasy. To make sense of the video’s popularity, the Times’s Wesley Morris suggests that to the 12- and 13-year-olds watching the video when it came out, “it isn’t the sex part that seems cool. It’s the control and command over herself and her space that seems cool.” I felt unsure that younger-me could distinguish the control from the sexiness. But before I could think too hard about it, Framing Britney Spears was making a compelling argument: Spears’s teen image was an expression of her sexuality, and questioning the kind of agency she had in it is misogynistic.

The filmmakers achieve this by alternating between footage of Spears and her collaborators asserting that she made her own decisions and sexist news coverage that shows how much the world hates women who make their own decisions. If “Baby One More Time” made me feel queasy, I was soon reminded that America is sexist and sexually repressed. If I wondered what kind of say Spears had in the “sexy” Rolling Stone photos taken in her childhood bedroom, I was soon reassured that she was never just some puppet. If I felt suspicious of Kim Kaiman, the marketing executive who argues that Spears simply had a gift for divining teen girls’ innate desire to act sexy and mirroring it back to them, overtly misogynistic news coverage would swoop in to provide a clearer target for my rage. Spears is the one who had to go on TV and defend this image, but the women who helped cultivate it cling to the narrative that, in the words of her stylist, Hayley Hill, “people were, like, uncomfortable with, you know, her sexuality.”

If you, the viewer, share in that discomfort, you are just another misogynistic cog, using the veil of concern for your own puritanical need to control a young woman. This argument serves a narrative purpose. The central drama of Framing Britney is the conservatorship Spears has lived under since 2008, which allows her father to control her finances and personal life. By suggesting she once had complete control, the documentary fuels the sense of injustice when that control is then taken away. The result is a documentary eager to characterize Spears’s early image as an expression of female power rather than the corporation-sanctioned sexualization of a 16-year-old.

In an effort to honor Spears’s autonomy, commentators I admire have taken up the documentary’s argument. One example was on one of my favorite podcasts, Las Culturistas, which I single out because I believe that Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang mean well and because I think their reaction encapsulates the documentary’s design. Rogers says, “When you watch the whole documentary, it’s clear [the media] had been out to get her from the beginning because people were uncomfortable with her expressing sexuality in the way that she did and connecting with young girls in the way that she did.” Yang adds, “It’s not even that it was a reactionary thing. It’s that we as a society were so fucking interrogational about her existence as a really confident performer, and an attractive performer, and someone who could be very commanding physically.”

I get it. When I first finished the doc, I was devastated on Spears’s behalf and amazed by the literalism of her being denied control over her own health and finances by her father and the legal system. The barrage of toxic early-aughts tabloid coverage and opportunistic men made me feel like I needed a shower. The invasive paparazzi footage reminded me of times when I have told men to leave me alone and their response was to double down. Sad and high on feminist ire, I didn’t think the doc was lacking any perspective until I texted with my friend Laia.
Laia was a teenager in the “Baby One More Time” era and said she didn’t understand why the doc was rewriting Spears as a feminist icon. “She was the Establishment! She was what we were supposed to be: sexy and young. Not a paragon of independence.” Laia also pointed out the faulty argument Kaiman tries to make, that only boy bands were popular at the time, in order to cast young Spears as a gender warrior. “She was a response to Alanis and the rise of the ‘angry woman.’” Not only angry women, but women across the genres of pop, rock, rap, and hip-hop who were singing more openly about sex than Spears was — sexual feelings, sexual experiences.

The doc wants the viewer to believe that Spears’s performance of sexuality liberated her and the masses and that it was this bravery plus her talent that resonated with and scared people. It wants you to know that, when asked about the Rolling Stone photos at the time, Spears said to an interviewer,  “Well, I think we’re all girls, and I mean, that’s a part of who we are. You’d be lying if you said you didn’t like to feel sexy. You know what I mean? You’re a girl.”

Wouldn’t it be comforting if things were that simple? But a cursory Google search brought up other feelings that Spears had about the shoot, reflecting in a 2003 interview for British GQ:

“How did I realise [I was a sex symbol]? Probably the first Rolling Stone cover by David LaChapelle. He came in and did the photos and totally tricked me. They were really cool but I didn’t really know what the hell I was doing. And, to be totally honest with you, at the time I was 16, so I really didn’t. I was back in my bedroom, and I had my little sweater on and he was like, ‘Undo your sweater a little bit more.’ The whole thing was about me being into dolls, and in my naïve mind I was like, ‘Here are my dolls!’ and now I look back and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, what the hell?’ But he did a very good job of portraying me in that way. It certainly wasn’t peaches and cream.”

The filmmakers do not acknowledge how Spears’s agency may have been compromised by her age, the stakes of wealth and fame, or the influence of the adults around her. They also do not engage the messier implications of the virginal-but-sexy archetype: Here is a girl who can perform sex for an audience’s benefit, but who, thank God, has not yet been tainted by experience. America’s response to Spears was puritanical, but so was the fantasy her image fulfilled.

Among all this trauma — Spears’s, mine, that of many women who grew up in the ’90s and early aughts — I can see why a viewer would find relief in concluding that Spears was always in complete control. But it is absurd to discuss her image from that time as though there was not an apparatus behind it, as though she existed in a vacuum where she was figuring out her sexuality on her own terms, rather than in an economy where young women’s sexuality is rapidly commodified until they are old enough to be discarded.
Like Britney Spears, I was professionally photographed, lying across the bed in my childhood bedroom, when I was a teenager. I had been 18 for a month. The shoot was by a male photographer for a fashion magazine the summer between my high-school graduation and my move to New York to star in the play This Is Our Youth. In the photo, I am lying on my side with my head propped up on my hand and wearing a vintage houndstooth romper my friend had just given me, my arms and legs bare. My head is tilted down, and I’m pouting, with heavily lined eyes and straightened blond hair. I don’t remember feeling uncomfortable in the moment; I don’t remember how the location or pose was decided; I don’t even remember what the photographer looked like. If anyone who was there told me the whole setup was my idea, I would believe them. I remember that the romper had symbolized, for me, my new life starting, and it’s very likely I was eager to update my public image as a sexually active being after extensively documenting an adolescence where I favored bulky layers and granny glasses.

Unlike in LaChapelle’s photos, there are no silky sheets or stuffed animals. Still, when I see the photo now, I just see another thin white able-bodied blonde girl being sexualized. There is absolutely nothing else happening in it. It is not a portrait of someone with a discernible personality, just a pout. Now, at 24, it represents many things that I despise.

I have been on all sides of such image-making. I founded Rookie, an online publication for and largely by teenage girls, when I was 15, nearly ten years ago. I edited it until I was 22, when it folded. We commissioned photos from teenage photographers and accepted submissions from our teenage readers. Occasionally, one of these photos was questioned by one of our readers for sexualizing its subject. For most of Rookie’s existence, I couldn’t see what they saw. I responded by pointing to the fact that these were teen girls innocently photographing their friends. When this critique was leveled at photos of girls in Girl Scout uniforms or cheerleader outfits, the fallacy seemed obvious: These were normal teen girl activities before they were fetishes!

I still think the context — who took these photos, their relationships to their subjects, and their place in a publication not intended for the male gaze — is important. But some of the poses and camera angles are more obviously suggestive to me now. I also see why I, and my fellow teen collaborators, thought that the photos were simply artsy, playful, or sophisticated: They resembled the images that we had absorbed. For me, that meant a mix of fashion magazines, movies, music videos, and thousands of sourceless photos that I inhaled from Tumblr.

This is not to implicate those photographers — after all, I was the editor with the final say, and adults worked at Rookie, too, and were in the awkward position of having a teenager for a boss. Nor is it to suggest that either Spears or myself is complicit in our own or other teen girls’ exploitation. Even young women who are not megafamous have typically picked up on what makes them appear valuable by the age of 15. Their capacity to perpetuate these standards doesn’t mean they are not also victims of these standards. If anything, it shows how girls’ bodies and sexuality are so deeply regulated by a society that despises women and fetishizes youth that some of us learned how to carry out its work all on our own.

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There is no need to believe it’s either Everything was Britney’s choice, and therefore she was always a sex-positive feminist or Nothing was Britney’s choice, and the evil adults made all her decisions. Both assertions sound desperate to protect her respectability — another version of her purity, in fact — as a prerequisite for compassion. They remind me of how readily conversations about abuse and assault focus on the moral character of the victim in order to confirm that they have indeed been victimized.

In the flurry of recent Britney Spears commentary, I thought of a few men who would be relieved to learn that it is considered anti-feminist and sex-negative to suggest that there is anything dub